(image by Monique Muse Dodd via Instagram)
Massive historical transformations, by dint of their scale and waves of consequences that ripple across time and space, are difficult to grasp without an effective point of entry. Consider, for instance, the literally unimaginable amount of knowledge — of self-knowledge — lost to the Atlantic slave trade: the family names, lore, languages, and foods, of which the diaspora retains powerful traces and iterations.
Much as these traditions survived from person to person and community to community, sometimes the vastness of what was lost is, paradoxically, accessed by drilling down into the most personal elements of a history. The visual artist and filmmaker Monique Muse Dodd takes on these themes of memory and forgetting via (Re) mnants, an interactive digital media installation “chronicling [her] journey into her ancestral and spiritual heritage.”
A film, an installation, and an act of art and ritual, Muse’s work creates a “portal for participants to cross a boundary between the imagined and the biographical, the physical and the spiritual, the living and the ancestors.”
Thursday through Sunday, Flux Factory hosts performances, offers a family gumbo, presents quilts, and holds an artist talk and closing party, all part of a ritual of “memorial and a rebirth.”
When: Events Thursday, January 11, through Sunday, January 13
Where: Flux Factory 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, Queens
